The business story
Pallav Nadhani (b. Bhagalpur, Bihar; raised in Kolkata) founded InfoSoft Global in 2002 at 17 and built FusionCharts — a data-visualization / charting library — into a globally used, bootstrapped, profitable product, with customers including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM. Scaffolded early by his father’s small computer business, he ran it solo for years, survived the Flash-to-JavaScript platform shift and open-source commoditization, and sold to US software firm Idera in 2020. He later built Collabion, Muze (acquired by Mode), invested via the Seeders syndicate, and became a co-founder of Presentations.AI (2025).
Early life and background
Pallav Nadhani was born in Bhagalpur, Bihar, into a Marwari family that moved to Kolkata when he was in his mid-teens. He attended La Martinière in Kolkata. His father, Kisor Nadhani, ran a computer-training centre and a web-design business, which meant software was part of the household well before Pallav started a company of his own.
As a teenager he was dissatisfied with the flat, unappealing charts produced by Excel and early-2000s web tools. He began using Macromedia Flash and ActionScript to draw charts that were interactive and visually polished. He documented the approach in a long article for ASPToday, a developer publication run by Wrox, which paid by the word; the fee of roughly $1,500 is often misreported as his first software sale. It became his seed money.
Building FusionCharts
In 2002, at 17, he set up InfoSoft Global in Kolkata, and FusionCharts shipped its first version that October. The opening price was around $15, largely dictated by payment-processor minimums. Sales came slowly at first, and on at least one American order the bank's fee exceeded the sale. Because he was a minor and could not hold the necessary accounts, his father held them for him, later joining as CFO in 2005.
For roughly three years Pallav was the company, handling code, website, documentation, support, marketing and sales across very long working weeks. Hiring began only after that, first in Kolkata and later with a Bangalore office. The company reported its first million dollars in revenue around 2006 to 2007 and about $4.5 million by 2011. By the time of its sale it cited tens of thousands of customers and over 750,000 developers in more than 100 countries, with clients such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.
The product survived two threats. When the industry abandoned Flash, FusionCharts was rebuilt in JavaScript and HTML5/SVG while still serving paying customers. Then free libraries such as Chart.js and D3.js made basic charting a commodity. In 2020 the US software company Idera acquired it on undisclosed terms.
